This is something you don’t see often in American news: Dead bodies.
But in Latin American stories, every time someone dies, there is a reporter to snap a picture of it and display it prominently in their news article.
This is an example:
Why do they do that? When did the trend start? Would such a thing be allowed in US news media?
Sensationalism. At least here in Panama, it’s most prevalent in the tabloid equivalents like El Siglo. The more respected papers like La Prensa don’t do it (at least much). The low rent papers love to splash gory pictures of dead drug dealers or murdered taxi drivers on the back page.
This sort of thing used to be common in the US. Here’s a photo of two victims of a mob hit from the NY Daily News in 1979.
The Daily News is still know for a sensationalist bent. Did the NY Times or Chicago Trib publish those kinds of things?
The Gray Lady would never stoop to such things. The Daily News, “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” is outdone these days by the NY Post.
“Allowed”?
I believe the First Amendment quite broadly “allows” US news media to print most anything they want to - they print what they think will be of interest to their audiences and/or what they think is newsworthy.
A lot of it is because these countries are still not as developed as the first world. Consequently death is a much more real, everyday thing to them so they’re not as desensitized to it as we are. Plus, again because of being less developed, crime (and therefore death from crime) is more common there.
Although they never posted gory death photos, one thing the NY Times used to do was to describe in detail the circumstances of a famous person’s death. If you read obituaries from 100 years ago or more, even when the person was very famous, a substantial portion of the obit is about the death itself – what the person was doing the day she died, the specific illness and symptoms, who was with her at the end, maybe a “last words” quote. A relatively small proportion of the article would be about the person’s life and accomplishments. I find it somewhat unsettling and a big contrast to the way obituaries are written today.
Yea newspapers in Trinidad do the same thing, BUT I kind of like it. Hear me out if you never see crime victims or people dead in road crashes it is easy to ignore the reality, seeing it makes it real.
I can recall there being a uproar about this front page in particular:
Warning dead but not gory baby.
The Grey Lady published a pretty damned bloody picture of the Charlie Hebdo editorial office on the front page on the 18th. I was kind of surprised.
I well remember working around Laredo and crossing the border into Nuevo Laredo evenings for shopping and dinner. Many of the small grocery stores had magazines prominently displayed in their window that showed all manner of gory death, every part of a woman dismembered by a chainsaw, cartel murder victims on the street in close up death pose, etc. At first I looked on in disbelief thinking it had to be fake. It most certainly was not.
Not really. Panama has a substantially lower rate of violent crime than New York City (and New York has one of the lowest violent crime rates among larger US cities).
Certainly countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and Brazil have high rates of violent crime, but this is not a general explanation.
Well yeah, but that’s because Panama was practically a colony of the US for a hundred years…
I think you meant the opposite. :dubious: If it’s a “real, everyday thing” then they ARE desensitized to it. It’s Americans who, on average, have never seen a dead human body firsthand and will lose their everloving shit over it the first time it happens.
That has nothing to do with why Panama has a low crime rate currently. The crime rate was quite high immediately after the US invasion in 1989 due to poverty as the result of the US sanctions, post-invasion looting, etc. Panama’s low crime rate now is due to a booming economy (growth of between 6 and 11% annually for the last 5 years, and the fastest growth rate in Latin America) and corresponding low unemployment (under 5% since 2012).
The generalizations you’re making are incorrect, and don’t reflect the actual situations in these countries.
I think you’d be better off asking why americans (and western countries in general) are so utterly terrified of showing what reality looks like?
Never mind dead bodies - if a primetime programme showed a 15 second clip of livestock being ‘processed’ there would probably be a nationwide outcry on a par with nipplegate.
It’s like there is some huge conspiracy to pretend that meat magically materialises on the supermarket shelf, crime victims spontaneously evaporate to leave only a chalk outline + a high school photo, and wars only result in property damage and mortality statistics.
No mention of the National Inquirer glory days?
Husband finds wife cheating, fabricates flame thrower and burns them to crisps in the act!
Yes, a lovely picture of two intertwined humans with no visible flesh - looking like a hot dog left over the fire way too long.
And the Italian story - rural man impregnates neighbors daughter, her father demands honor.
To make it right, the man murders his own son, chops him up and feeds him to the pigs.
Several photos of the scraps found - the pigs couldn’t handle the skull, so it was relatively intact.
At a guess, I would posit that it’s simply due to market forces. Take Hollywood for example. In the 70s and 80s, they produced a lot of films with nudity, on the presumption that sex sells.
However, at the same time, the ratings system was coming in and becoming standardized and accepted by the public for meaningful guidance. This allowed the bean counters, at the big studios, to do some data mining to find the correlation between nudity and money. The result of that math was the discovery that an R rating lowers sales, despite decades of common wisdom to the contrary. Subsequently, Hollywood makes everything PG-13 or less.
Basically, as industries become more professional, they cater more to the quirks of the mass public and less on the morals, guidelines, and proclivities of the creators.
From wikipedia: National Enquirer - Wikipedia
They were a New York paper in 1952 with a circulation that had fallen to 17,000 copies per week. It changed owners and evolved into a national paper with sex and gore: by 1966 circulation topped one million.
So what happened? The National Enquirer wanted to be sold in supermarket checkstands. Apparently small news-stands were in decline. At any rate, they switched to celebrities and the occult. Perhaps in Latin America the bulk of the distribution of tabloids is not in a corporate chain store environment.
